Staff are assigned to tasks and complete tasks in projects.

There are two types of staff in Projectal;

• Staff. These are real people that are employed by companies.
• Generic Staff.  These are generic (or placeholder) staff that you use when you are bidding, budgeting and planning projects.

Example of Staff: "Jane Doe" is employed as a freelance Producer at your company and she is assigned onto certain projects.  She is one of 450 staff employed at your company.  Jane is paid $1000 per day and is located in Vancouver and is taking a 3 week vacation in March.

Example of Generic Staff: "Mid-level Animator" is a generic staff classification that you can use and assign to any project or task where you require mid-level animators. You have set this generic staff to be paid $500 per day for bidding, budgeting and planning purposes.  Later, as the project begins, you will replace these generic staff assignments with staff from your company's staff pool.  

Staff belong to companies.  For example, your company or a subsidiary or an outsourced company.

Staff can be assigned into departments so that you can organize them nicely into an org chart.  For example, Jane is a Producer belongs in the Production department.

Staff can have skills.  Projectal uses these skills to rank and match staff in your project's staff pool to tasks based on their requirements.  For example, John has mid-level animation skills and senior-level rigging skills. 

Staff can have resources.  Typically resources are the items that they need to do their work.  For example, a computer, a set of software licenses, a set of screens, cameras, etc.  This lets your company resource plan (or capacity plan) your staffing requirements to ensure you have the correct capacity of these items for your staff pool.

Staff have a salary or pay rate that is used by Projectal to automatically calculate estimated costs and actual costs of projects and tasks.  For example, Jane is paid $1000 per day.

Staff can be classed by their employment type.  For example, full-time, part-time, contractor, freelancer, intern or casual.

Staff belong to a location and this location helps to define their working week and their non-working days (typically their regional pubic holidays).  Staff also have their own calendar where they can have their individual working week and their own personal non-working days (typically holidays). 

Staff have a start date when they were employed and a finish date if they left the company or have a fixed contract.  Projectal uses this when scheduling projects and alerting you when there are staff assignment issues.

Staff can have multiple employment contracts to reflect when they have been employed at the company - such as a freelancer. Or, multiple contracts can used to how a staff member has received promotions within the company or salary increases. Employment contracts are used in Projectal when calculating budgets and costs. Employment contracts are also used in the Staff Planner.

Syncing with Human Resources (HR) tools

If your company uses a HR tool and it already contains your staff details, then it may be best for Projectal to automatically sync the staff details from your HR tool.  This eliminates double entry and keeps Projectal up-to-date whenever changes are made in your HR tool.

Using the Projectal API, webhooks and Python library, connectors can be created to sync HR data from popular HR tools into Projectal.  Contact the Projectal Support team to inquire about their library of pre-built connectors that are available to you as a Projectal customer - including BambooHR, Xero and more.  Or, the Projectal Support team can assist to get you up and running with a new connector for your HR tool.